Making a Winner Out of Losers : Movies: College dropout, foreign-film buff and first-time director Richard Linklater raised $23,000 for a 97-minute long ‘no budget experiment’ on the wastrels of his native Texas.

Losers and schmoozers, philosophers, poets, assorted conspiracy buffs and lunatics by the score--not the stuff of your typical Hollywood blockbuster, or even an interesting L.A. cocktail party. But as drawn and manipulated by first-time filmmaker Richard Linklater, the ravings and conversations of a collection of societal drop-outs--”slackers”--who slink through the alleys and coffee houses of Austin, Tex., might just be the stuff that Hollywood dreams are made of.

“Slacker,” an experimental film shot for $23,000 (or about 1/4,000th of what it cost to make “Terminator 2”), is another in the line of low-budget, independent films that have launched such directors as Spike Lee (“She’s Gotta Have It”) and Steven Soderbergh (“sex, lies and videotape”) into the big time. While some critics have dismissed “Slacker” as a grueling yawn-athon, many others have brazenly heralded the arrival of a gifted new talent. Writing in Newsweek, Jack Kroll suggested that Linklater “could well follow in the footsteps of Tim Burton,” the quirky directing superstar of “Batman,” “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands.”

“There is nothing better than a $20,000 film from nowhere and ‘Slacker’ was just the most original thing I saw last year,” said John Pierson, an independent producer’s representative who sold “Slacker” to distributor Orion Classics as well as getting “She’s Gotta Have It,” Michael Moore’s “Roger & Me” and several other movies national distributors.

Ever since “Slacker” delighted audiences at last year’s Seattle Film Festival and played at the Sundance festival last January, Hollywood agents and producers have been circling the unassuming and very-far-from-star-struck Linklater. And the film, which opens at the Nuart Friday, has drawn crowds this month in theaters in New York and Austin.

“I do have fun when I come to New York or L.A., but I always have the feeling that I want to escape as soon as possible,” said the still agent-free Linklater during a recent visit. “They hit you pretty hard. Hollywood is always looking for new talent. But there is a big part of me that really wants to hang out in Texas and work on my own thing. ‘Slacker’ was an experimental first film and I feel like I still have a lot to learn. It’s sort of amazing to me that people think I can go do a $20 million real movie.”

Linklater, 29, is slightly surprised, but not completely amazed that his “no-budget experiment” about a tiny enclave of Texas wastrels has attained such high visibility. The film is so odd that when he hit up his family and friends for the funds to film it, he didn’t even bother to explain the premise.

“I told them, ‘It’s just this film that I really want to make. It will never make money, but I’ll pay you back somehow,’ ” Linklater recalled. “And when I presented it to the crew it was, ‘Hey, it will be fun and it will never make any money but we’ll get to express ourselves and learn a lot.’ But in the back of my mind, of course I was making it the right length of a film and I did have some vague notion that we might sell it to European TV or something.”

He did make all $23,000 and more back by selling the movie to German television for $35,000, before it was completed, after showing a piece of it at the Independent Features Market in New York. And he did make it 97 minutes long.

What you get in those 97 minutes is about 97 separate “slackers” of all shapes and sizes, none of whom are on screen for more a minute or two and none of whom ever return. There’s the madman who thinks the CIA has long ago colonized Mars as an escape for certain powerful elites from the eventual burning up of Earth as a result of the greenhouse effect. There’s a Kennedy assassination loony, a wacko who runs his mother over with his car and then watches home movies of her playing with him as a child, and a jilted lover who throws his typewriter into a river to cleanse himself of his broken heart. There’s the TV freak who keeps a set strapped to his back--and complains that real life isn’t as real as a video image because you can’t rewind it or adjust the hue.

Linklater’s camera eavesdrops on a single conversation until one person wanders off, leading the camera into another vignette. After awhile, noticing how Linklater is going to make the transition from one scene to another becomes almost as interesting as the actual dialogue. Part of the reason Linklater bucked conventional film wisdom that says a movie needs a couple of likable main characters played by stars in favor of about 100 characters played by non-actors was that he couldn’t afford to pay anyone. (With the various sales, he’s since been able to pay his actors and crew). But back then, he figured that asking people to work for free for a day or two at the most wasn’t all that oppressive.

When asked about how he views these lollygaggers, Linklater, an easy-going foreign film buff who dropped out of college, played it pretty close to the vest. A Texas native, he spent a couple of years working on offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico to earn enough money that, like the unemployed “slackers” in his film, he would be free to hang out, think and teach himself how to make films on home-movie cameras. While he acknowledges that some viewers have found these lives futile and depressing, it’s obvious that he maintains a great deal of affection for them all.

“There’s a bit of me in all the slackers,” Linklater explained. “There is a sense of vertigo that everyone is in their own peculiar little world, and society is quick to judge and proclaim that these ideas and these lives are useless. But not everyone is apathetic or lazy. They are all trying to do something with their ideas. They might not have much to show for it right now, but there might be some potential there.”

Beyond “Slacker,” Pierson said that Linklater’s own days as a slacker are probably over, although he cautions that for many independent film makers who insist on working on their own terms rather than grabbing an agent and graduating to a big-budget studio package, getting the money for their next film is often a grind. It took Lizzie Borden 4 1/2 years to make another movie after “Working Girls,” Pierson points out, and the next idea Linklater has been talking about most is far more “radical” than commercial.

Now nearly two years since he was hanging around the streets of Austin filming “Slacker,” Linklater is itching to get back to work. But he’s wary about taking money to make any film that might be too experimental or too personal to earn it all back.

“I know the natural progression, the Hollywood dream, is to move on to bigger and bigger budgets, but I have never had that dream to jump into Hollywood,” Linklater said. “I have a couple of ideas that might work for a bigger audience. And I know some of the others probably aren’t very commercial and so I can’t spend much on them. I know it sounds sort of dopey but I really just want to keep making films. There’s still some things I’d like to play with back in Austin, and I hope that this helps put me in the position to do that.”